Ecology as pre-text? The paradoxical presence of ecological thematics in contemporary Scandinavian quality TV

Abstract

The Scandinavian middle classes have been trained in feeling guilty and shameful about their social and economical privileges as well as these privileges in combinations with gender and/ or ethnicity. But "eco-guilt" or "eco-shame" has hardly been represented properly in cinema and TV series to this day. In this article, I want to offer a kind of prediction, rather than a description, of what may be an upcoming major theme in Scandinavian visual narratives: ecoguilt and eco-shame. I see signs of this in the recent TV series Jordskott from Sweden, the Norwegian Okkupert and the Danish Bedrag, but my point will be that the ecological issues here are used as a useful background or a dramaturgical starting point rather than as a major theme: as pretexts, in the double sense of the word. The use of ecology as pretext in Scandinavian TV series will be the subject of this article where I intend to focus on the way that the question of eco-guilt seems to be an alluring and tempting as well as repressed thematic, a fact that can be read out of the three series' paradoxical opening sequences.

Transformations of the Evil Forest in the Swedish Television Series Jordskott: An ecocritical reading

“…1 Whereas Occupied has received considerable scholarly attention (cf. Leyda, 2018;Mrozewicz, 2018;Saunders, Mrozewicz, and Dodds & Hochscherf, in this issue), Jordskott's environmentalist streak has, up until now, remained underexposed except for Jørgen Bruhn's brief discussion of the ecocritical imagery of its opening sequence (Bruhn, 2018). In this article, I analyse the show's first season with an aim to flesh out its capacity to contribute to raising environmental consciousness.…”

Towards an Intermedial Ecocriticism

“…I will refrain from setting out in any detail Elleström's notion of the four modalities of media or the distinctions between basic media types, qualified media types, and technical media of display, which are all clearly explained in Elleström (2020). Elsewhere, I have constructed an analytical model based on Elleström's ideas (Bruhn 2016;Bruhn and Gjelsvik 2018). What I do want to stress is that Elleström's modelling of media makes it possible to gain a fundamental understanding of three basic intermedial ideas that I consider to be part of the essential infrastructure of intermedial studies.…”

“…What I do want to stress is that Elleström's modelling of media makes it possible to gain a fundamental understanding of three basic intermedial ideas that I consider to be part of the essential infrastructure of intermedial studies. The first idea is that all media products are medially and modally mixed, which of course is an idea that other researchers have been well aware of but have often described in more intuitive ways (Mitchell 1994;Bruhn 2010). It is tempting to jump to the conclusion that this would mean that there are no such things as media types (or genres, or other comparable categories), but this is not the case: almost all media products are, according to their definition, part of a qualified media type, but these types are not only defined by their constellation of media and modalities; they are also contextually and operationally defined.…”

“…The basic material dimension of the novel is printed letters on paper pages, and the spatiotemporal set-up is that of most of narrative written literature (see Bruhn (2016): a forward sequence is suggested even though one can indeed read a novel from the end and towards the beginning or read it at random places. Besides turning the pages and holding the book, which requires the sense of touch, the most important sensorial aspect when reading a novel is of course using our eyesight to read.…”

Noora som verdensredder og feministi NRK-serienSkam

“…Den fulle tittel inkluderer de tyske og franske termene for tittelsekvens i parentes: «Reading the Title Sequence (Vorspann, Générique).» problemer på tross av at andre problemer i denne verden er større'). I den forstand kan de betraktes som et eksempel på det Jørgen Bruhn i en analyse av skandinaviske tv-serier omtaler som «the pretext-aspect» av åpningssekvenser (der han spiller på tvetydigheten i ordet «pretext» som kan bety en tekst som kommer før en annen tekst og/eller et påskudd): «The opener covers a larger ideological sphere without fully examining the consequences of its possibly provocative or unpleasant message» (Bruhn, 2018). 14 Tittelsekvensen setter imidlertid ikke bare rammene for tema og miljø, men også for genre, stil og tone.…”